


Our Hollow Bones

by waltzmatildah



Category: Chicago Fire, Grey's Anatomy
Genre: Angst, Drug Use, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-06
Updated: 2013-02-06
Packaged: 2017-11-28 10:15:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/673279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waltzmatildah/pseuds/waltzmatildah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An AU following on from the events of <i>Chicago Fire</i> 1x11. No spoilers for <i>Grey’s Anatomy</i></p><p>- - -</p><p> </p><p>  <i>Signage welcoming him to Seattle appears out of nowhere. The last several hundred miles of highway dissolved completely into a blur of exhausted numbness.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Our Hollow Bones

**Author's Note:**

  * For [OvariesOfSteel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OvariesOfSteel/gifts).



_afraid over time we’ve got nowhere to go but here_

_-_

There’s a scar, faded white with age now, that crosses two of the knuckles on his right hand. His fingers are drumming steadily against the kitchen counter, a product of pent up energy that has no escape route, and he’s staring, staring, staring at the line across his skin.

The apartment remains resolutely empty despite the fact Shay was released from the hospital three days ago. The shadows make him feel small and insignificant in a way that seems wholly familiar but disconcertingly _strange_ at the same time, like the face reflected back in the mirror is no longer his, and all the thoughts and all the dreams and all the _mind-numbing fears_ that used to live inside him have vaporised.

All that’s left is skin and bone and air in lungs that barely remember how to breathe.

 

 

 

He packs a bag. 

He knows this because if he shifts his gaze an inch or several to the right he can see it, the zipper not quite pulled all the way closed and leaning slightly, up against the passenger door of his car.

He can’t for the life of him remember what he’s put in there.

There’s a song on the radio that he doesn’t recognise. Words and sound fill the inside of his head, a melancholy that grows heavier with every repeat of the chorus until he thinks he might be crying but isn’t really sure why or how and can’t bring himself to find out.

He laughs at the notion.

At the ridiculous realisation that his life has completely dissolved to dust and to ash and that all he can see of it now is the pattern other people’s footprints have left in his mess.

Matt’s boots and Shay’s bare feet. Heather, Andy, Anna.

Renee… The both of them.

 

 

 

The sun finally sets on him for good somewhere just past the state line. The headlights of his car bounce along the highway, endless blacktop disappearing beneath the hood. He drives with his right hand in his lap, because moving his arm into position to hold the wheel with both whites out his vision for pulsed heart beats at a time. 

There’s a silver strip of painkillers tucked resolutely into the pocket of his jacket that he’s refusing to think about.

He stops for gas just outside of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. It’s almost midnight and it takes him several attempts to haul himself from the car. His right leg is awash with pins and needles that flip flop through his gut, and his right arm is deadweight. He’s beyond figuring out if it’s getting worse for real, or if it’s always been this bad. 

Seventeen hours have passed since he last took anything for the agony.

 

 

 

He’s ten more minutes down the road when a quick shift of his chin to glance in the rear-view mirror almost splits him in two. He concedes inevitable defeat then. Charges an overpriced hotel room to his credit card and swallows down two of the pills from his pocket with a mini bottle of vodka.

Sleeps.

Or, at least, pretends to.

 

 

 

The insistent chirp of his cell phone drags him back to consciousness several hours later. He feels heavy and stuck and thick, and he stares at the backlit screen, unmoving, until it switches through to voicemail.

He brings his knees up to his chest, closes his eyes around the sight of the faded denim he hadn’t bothered to remove and wonders, distantly, if this is maybe what depression feels like.

He doubts it though, figures he needs to work his way through more logical explanations like stupidity and cowardice before he can claim something so legitimate for how utterly hollowed out he feels.

 

 

 

He works his way through the same pattern as the previous day. Drives until he’s inches from passing out then drops cash he doesn’t really have on a room with a hot shower and a double bed.

He notes with some degree of abstract fascination that the narcotics do a pretty decent job of cutting through the pain, but they don’t do anything to stop the sudden muscle spasms in his hand. The fact that he can’t feel the pain of his fingers clenching awkwardly, even though they do keep on doing it, makes the denial he’s currently wading through that much easier to maintain.

 

 

 

Signage welcoming him to Seattle appears out of nowhere. The last several hundred miles of highway dissolved completely into a blur of exhausted numbness. The sky above him, bright, white-blue; cloudless, as though the city itself is attempting to disprove every stereotype he’s ever heard about the place.

The Space Needle splits the horizon in two and he uses the giant structure as a reference point to guide the final few minutes of his journey. An inevitable culmination of sorts comprised of red lights and stop signs and all manner of other ominous obstacles.

 

 

 

He’s lightheaded when he finally shifts to standing. Just the functioning side of high as a kite as the narcotics he’s recently dry swallowed work their way completely into his blood stream. He’d vowed not to do it like this; it’s been years after all and he’s well versed in the staunch opinions held by the only person that matters here regarding off-the-books drug use.

But his resolve is paper thin by now, worn down and frayed, and he knows that, if sober, the part that must come next would never happen.

“Alex?” he says, blinks, urges the muscles in his face to contract into something that might look like a smile. Despite the years that have passed, the face that turns towards him, confused, brow narrowed into a frown, still delivers that longed for beat of _familiarity_.

“Man, you look like _crap_.”

He grins because, yes, yes he does. And he’s always been able to count on Alex to tell it like it is.

 

 

 

There’s an intern, at least, he guesses that’s what she is, trailing after them as Alex steers him down a series of labyrinthian hallways. She keeps calling him _Doctor Karev_ , keeps filling the space after his name with strings of words and numbers and abbreviations that might as well be a foreign language.

That Alex can understand her, that he can do more than that, that he can _answer her back in the same foreign language_ seems hilarious all of a sudden.

He’s dragged through a doorway abruptly then, fingers tight around his upper arm and the back of his head glancing lightly off the metal base of a bunk as he’s shoved down onto a mattress. 

He wants to protest the treatment but doesn’t really think now is the time for that.

“Alex?”

The intern is standing in the doorway, and even he can detect the shift in her tone. The drop from hurried professionalism to cautious concern. Alex holds a hand up in her direction, he looks pissed which is comforting, it always was his default setting after all.

“Just, five minutes okay, Wilson? Give me five minutes…”

The door closes and he looks up, catches Alex’s gaze.

“You’re screwing her, aren’t you?”

 

 

 

There’s an argument after that. He can’t remember what about. He rolls his eyes a lot, completely loses focus twice as often, until;

“You’re high.” A statement of fact.

He doesn’t bother to lie. It’s the one thing they’ve never done to each other. 

He can’t bring himself to start now, no matter how easily he’s managed to lie to everyone else.

No matter how easily he’s managed to lie to himself.

“Yeah. I’m high…”

 

 

 

He doesn’t remember falling asleep, but when he wakes up the room is lit only with the soft glow of a corner lamp. The intern from before, Wilson, is curled uncomfortably into a chair, a medical chart in her lap, more stacked at her feet. His babysitter, he guesses. Mentally confirms: Alex is _definitely_ sleeping with her.

As he shifts his neck and shoulder catch, a tight stiffness that is not pain, but is not exactly comfortable either. His face twitches into a grimace before he can school his features flat and when he opens his eyes again she’s no longer pretending to work and is simply staring at him openly, her pen clamped between her teeth.

“Hey,” he says. His voice bounces around the room, sets the pounding in his head to high frequency in an instant.

She raises her eyebrows at him, smirks her lips into something of a knowing grin that says more than words ever could. He likes her already, he decides.

 

 

 

Alex returns, proffers stale coffee and hospital cafeteria sandwiches with a combination of silent gestures that clearly communicate _eat_.

He’s half-way through a sandwich, barely choking down the soggy bread with its indeterminate fillings, when he realises, horrified, that he’s crying. He has no idea when it started, _why_ it started, but, equally, he’s not convinced he knows how to make it stop.

“Crap, Kelly, what’s going on?”

He blinks, watches with morbid fascination as a tear lands on the remains of the sandwich still clenched between his fingertips and disappears almost immediately into the crust. He flicks his gaze across the room, catches Alex staring back at him, elbows on his knees and chin in his hands.

“I have no idea,” he says, rides the words out on a steady exhale. It’s nothing less than the truth after all.

 

 

 

He thinks Alex looks tired. Wonders, absently, what kind of hours he works and how much time off he gets. Too many and not enough, respectively, he guesses.

“Despite the fact we haven’t seen each other for, god, _years_ , you drove half-way across the country to freaking _Seattle_ , you get here and you’re high as a fucking kite, you look like you haven’t slept for a month, and you have no idea what’s going on?”

And he thinks, when Alex lays it all out for him like that, he could not sound any more unhinged.

 

 

 

He can’t come up with the right words. 

He’s not even sure they exist for him to find.

“I should go,” he says instead. Pushes to standing and stalks towards the door with purpose despite the fact that his vision has almost greyed out completely at the sudden shift in altitude.

A body, _Alex_ , swims into view. Hands on his shoulders, holding him in place.

“You know I’m crap at this, Severide. Just tell me what the hell is going on.”

“Andy’s dead,” he finally says. Drops the words at Alex’s feet and then lowers his gaze to see if they’re somehow spelled out across the scuffed tile. 

Maybe, if they’re not, it won’t be true anymore.

 

 

 

They walk back through the maze of whitewashed hallways and out into the damp evening air. He follows the path he’d first taken, the one back to his car, Alex at his shoulder, and they’re not speaking now but the silence is no longer loaded, uncomfortable. They’re back in high-school, side-by-side, and maybe they’re on their way to the gym where, if he’s lucky, Alex will let him win, just once, in an impromptu wrestling match.

“I’m sorry to dump this all on you,” he says eventually, quietly, doesn’t even bother to turn his head and look at Alex as he says the words. It’ll be easier like this, he thinks.

Alex laughs; a harsh bark of air that sounds completely devoid of genuine humour. “It’s probably about time I returned the favour anyway, hey…”

 

 

 

He unlocks the car and swings the passenger door wide open. Tips his pack forward and releases the envelope of scans he’d thought to tuck behind it.

And maybe he always did have a purpose for this trip.

He straightens up, turns back to Alex, hesitates briefly as his heart starts up a vicious marching band beat in his chest. Finds, inexplicably, that he can’t hand them over, the scans, needs Alex to reach forward and peel them from his grasp.

“What’s this?”

The beginning of the end, he thinks. 

For real this time.

 

 

 

Alex, eyes still locked fiercely on him, slides the sheet of images from the envelope, twists then, holds the film up against the fluorescent glow of a streetlight.

This time, his silence, seconds, minutes, hours long, tells a thousand stories.

None of them good.

“Okay,” Alex says finally, lowers the scans to his side and turns back around, one hand pressed to his mouth in a way that makes him almost impossible to read. Almost. “There’s a couple of people we need to go and see.”

He nods back dumbly, inexplicably relieved all of a sudden, weightless as he finally lets himself hand over control to someone else. 

_Hand over control to Alex…_

And maybe he’ll get through this after all.

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for Fandomaid's Superstorm Sandy fundrasier, held on Livejournal.


End file.
